Big Brother alliances are agreements between houseguests to protect one another, share information, control votes or reach a particular point in the game together. Some last for months. Some are dead before everyone involved has learned the name.
The important part is not the name. It is what the people inside the alliance actually do. A real alliance can control nominations, protect its members with votes and hide smaller deals inside the larger group. A fake alliance may exist only to make one side feel safe.
- Alliance: two or more houseguests agreeing to work together in the game.
- Voting bloc: a group that reliably votes together.
- Final-two deal: a two-person agreement to take each other to the end.
- Side alliance: an additional deal outside a houseguest’s main group.
- Fake alliance: a named or agreed group that one or more members never intends to honor.
- Alliance within an alliance: a smaller core protected inside a larger group.
How do Big Brother alliances work?
An alliance gives houseguests numbers. If enough members survive a week, they can decide an eviction without needing the rest of the house. If one wins Head of Household, the group can influence who goes on the block. If another wins the Power of Veto, they may be able to protect the nominations the alliance wants or remove one of its own members.
But an alliance does not have to control every competition to control a week. Votes matter just as much. A group that knows exactly where its votes are going can survive an HOH won by somebody outside it.
That is why the strongest alliances are often difficult to see from inside the house. Members do not necessarily spend all day together. They may argue, nominate one another as pawns, build relationships on opposite sides and maintain smaller deals that make the larger group harder to identify.
The Big Brother strategy guide goes deeper into voting blocs, final-two deals, lying, floating, competition strategy and jury management. This page is about the groups themselves.
What types of alliances are there?
Majority alliances
A majority alliance has enough members, votes or attached allies to dominate the house for a period of the game. It does not mean every member has equal power. Large alliances frequently contain a smaller core making the real decisions.
The Committee in Big Brother 22 is a modern example of a large group that stayed intact deep into the season while its members repeatedly held power.
Voting blocs
A voting bloc is narrower. It is a group that votes together even when its members have separate relationships elsewhere.
The Friendship in Big Brother 6 became one of the clearest early examples: the house split into opposing sides, the Friendship kept its numbers together, and Maggie and Ivette became the final two.
Final-two deals
A final-two deal is the smallest possible alliance: two houseguests promising to take each other to the end.
The danger is obvious. A houseguest can have more than one final-two deal, and only one of them can ultimately be honored. The Hitmen in Big Brother 16 were Derrick and Cody’s two-person deal inside a much larger network. They reached the final two together.
Side alliances
A side alliance is an extra agreement made outside a player’s main group. It can provide protection if the main alliance loses power, or give somebody information from another part of the house.
All-Stars showed how complicated this can become. Big Brother 7 contained the Season 6 bloc, Chilltown, the Legion of Doom and several overlapping pairs and side arrangements at the same time. Knowing that two people were allied did not tell you who else they had promised safety to.
Fake alliances
Some alliances are never real to everyone involved. A player may agree to a name and a plan simply to keep the other people comfortable while reporting the information somewhere else.
Big Brother 17 is particularly useful for seeing this in practice because the feeds produced alliance after alliance, including groups that were real, temporary, overlapping or fake. The surviving Big Brother 17 alliances record tracks those groups as they appeared.
Alliances inside alliances
This is one of the most common structures in modern Big Brother: build a large alliance for numbers, then build a smaller alliance inside it for trust.
Big Brother 16 showed the structure clearly. The eight-person Bomb Squad collapsed almost immediately, smaller combinations survived inside the wreckage, and the two-person Hitmen deal lasted all the way to finale night.
Pairs, duos and showmances
Two people working together are effectively an alliance whether they bother to name it or not. A showmance can also become a strategic pair, but the relationship itself does not automatically make it an alliance. The house may still treat it like one because it sees two votes and two people likely to protect each other.
The relationship side of the game is tracked separately in the showmances and flirtmances guide.
What is the difference between an alliance and a voting bloc?
An alliance is the broader agreement. Members may promise safety, share information, coordinate nominations or plan an endgame together.
A voting bloc is about the vote itself. If five people agree every Thursday on who leaves, they are acting as a bloc even if their individual loyalties and side deals are more complicated.
The distinction matters because Big Brother houses are rarely made of two neat teams. One houseguest may be inside a six-person alliance, a three-person side group and two separate final-two deals at the same time. An alliance chart can look impossible while the eviction vote remains completely predictable.
How do Big Brother alliances get their names?
Usually the houseguests name them themselves. Naming a group can make an informal agreement feel official, and half the fun is watching six people spend longer choosing a name than deciding whom they want evicted.
Some names become permanent immediately. Others are used once and disappear. Some groups change names as members are removed or a smaller core separates from the original alliance.
The name can also make the history look cleaner than it really was. A finished season may be remembered as though one alliance appeared fully formed on Day 1, even when the feeds show membership, priorities and side deals changing for weeks.
That is why OBB treats the live-feed record as the starting point rather than working backward from the final alliance chart.
What is a Big Brother alliance chart?
An alliance chart is a way of tracking who is working with whom at a particular moment in the season. It is not an official game document and it is not permanent. It is a snapshot.
A useful chart has to distinguish between a real alliance, a final-two deal, a loose voting agreement, a fake alliance and a group that has already collapsed. Otherwise everybody who had one conversation together ends up connected to everybody else.
That problem becomes obvious early in almost every season. The first two weeks can produce more named groups than the rest of the summer combined. By jury, many of them exist only in old screenshots and feed conversations.
OBB’s season records preserve those changes rather than pretending the final version was always the plan.
The best Big Brother alliances
There is no single shape that makes an alliance successful. Some dominated from the middle of the game. Some survived by appearing weaker than they were. Some were huge and imploded. Some were only two people.
Chilltown — Big Brother 2 and Big Brother 7
Chilltown began in Big Brother 2 and returned in Big Brother 7 All-Stars. In All-Stars, Will and Boogie survived a house that initially contained a much larger Season 6 bloc by building overlapping relationships instead of trying to win the numbers battle outright. Boogie eventually won the season.
The Friendship — Big Brother 6
Big Brother 6 became a house divided between the Friendship and the Sovereign Six. The split drove almost the entire season. The Friendship ultimately supplied both finalists, with Maggie defeating Ivette 4–3.
The Brigade — Big Brother 12
The Brigade used a structure that became a model for later alliances: a secret core whose members built separate relationships outside it. Three Brigade members reached the final three of Big Brother 12, and Hayden beat Lane 4–3.
The Bomb Squad and the Hitmen — Big Brother 16
The Bomb Squad is the warning against assuming bigger means stronger. The eight-person alliance was falling apart within the opening week. The much smaller Hitmen deal inside the season’s alliance network lasted to the final two, where Derrick beat Cody 7–2.
Big Brother 17’s alliance maze
No single name explains Big Brother 17’s alliances. The season cycled through overlapping groups including the Sixth Sense, Freaks and Geeks, Scamper Squad, Goblins and a long list of smaller deals. It is one of the clearest examples of why an alliance list and an alliance chart are not the same thing as the actual power structure.
Level 6 — Big Brother 20
Level 6 survived weeks in which the opposite side won power because its members kept information moving and repeatedly got the eviction result they wanted. The alliance eventually supplied both finalists in Big Brother 20, with Kaycee beating Tyler 5–4.
The Committee — Big Brother 22
The Committee sat at the center of Big Brother 22 All-Stars. Its members repeatedly won HOH and veto power while outsiders were removed, and Cody eventually reached the final two without being nominated and won 9–0.
The Cookout — Big Brother 23
The Cookout — Tiffany, Xavier, Kyland, Azah, Big D and Hannah — reached the final six together in Big Brother 23, with Xavier ultimately winning 9–0.
The part that matters strategically is how they hid it. On July 28, Tiffany laid out a plan on the feeds in which members maintained close outside partners so the house would see separate pairs instead of one six-person group. OBB’s live-feed record from that morning preserves the plan while it was still being worked out.
That contemporary record is messier than the version usually remembered later. Xavier’s outside partner in Tiffany’s July 28 plan was Christian; Alyssa became the later pairing after Christian left. Hannah was already part of Tiffany’s six-person math while Azah and Big D were still talking about the Cookout as five. The alliance worked, but it did not arrive in the house as one perfectly finished diagram.
The Leftovers — Big Brother 24
The seven-person Leftovers formed after the opening weeks of Big Brother 24 and moved all seven members deep into the game before internal groups and competing endgame plans broke the alliance apart.
Why do Big Brother alliances fall apart?
Usually because the reason for staying together disappears.
- Too many people know about it. Large groups leak.
- Members have different priorities. One person’s shield is another person’s target.
- Side deals become more important. The smaller alliance inside the alliance starts protecting itself.
- Someone wins the wrong HOH. Power forces a houseguest to show which promise is real.
- The outsiders are gone. An alliance that succeeds eventually reaches the point where its members have nobody left to evict except one another.
The Cookout is a clean example of the last problem. Its members had serious internal friction long before the final six, but they kept the larger agreement intact until the mission was complete. Once only the six remained, Tiffany was the first member evicted and the alliance became the endgame it had postponed all summer.
Big Brother alliances by season
OBB tracks alliances inside the season records because that is where most of them belong. A season page can show which groups actually mattered without creating a permanent page for every alliance name somebody invented during Week 1.
- Big Brother 6 — Friendship and Sovereign Six.
- Big Brother 7 All-Stars — Chilltown, Season 6, Legion of Doom and overlapping endgame deals.
- Big Brother 12 — the Brigade.
- Big Brother 16 — Bomb Squad, Detonators and Hitmen.
- Big Brother 17 alliances — the surviving dedicated alliance record, including the season’s many overlapping groups.
- Big Brother 20 — Level 6 and the opposing side of the house.
- Big Brother 22 All-Stars — the Committee and its surrounding deals.
- Big Brother 23 — the Cookout and its outside-partner structure.
- Big Brother 24 — the Leftovers and the groups that emerged when it split.
Where can I find the current Big Brother alliances?
Current-season alliances change too quickly for an evergreen page to pretend they are fixed. A group can form after midnight and be dead before nominations.
The current alliance picture belongs with today’s Big Brother spoilers, where the feeds can show who is actually sharing information, making voting commitments and changing sides as it happens.
Alliance terms
Need the rest of the language around the game? The Big Brother glossary covers alliance, backdoor, block, floater, pawn, HOH, POV and the other terms that turn a normal conversation into a Big Brother conversation.